The dust from another unfortunate police shooting involving an unarmed black man has settled, and it’s clear that this latest one served its purpose. A few people across the country made quite a bit of money…
By now, we’re all too familiar with the vicious cycle: first, there’s the shooting. It’s then followed by those leeches and vampires who call themselves reverends and journalists smelling blood—and money. They make their play. Finally, the cycle is rounded out by ultimately reducing someone like Stephon Clark from a human being to a mere cash cow in the racial grievance industry. The sheep flock to the streets in protest. The cameras flash. There’s outrage everywhere. Put another quarter in the merry-go-round.
Never mind the animosity caused and forget about the better interests of society at-large, Al Sharpton needs the funds for another gastric bypass. CNN needs their ratings. Politicians need to rally that base they’ve been ignoring. The common theme? The Maxine Waterses, Jesse Jacksons, and Don Lemons of the world want nothing to do with the depressed communities these incidents take place in…until a black man lays dead from a bullet out of a cop’s gun that might as well be a starting pistol signaling a race for profits has begun. Kick the nest and collect all the honey while the bees are out looking for someone to sting; it’s a hustle.
Look, this is nothing new. The method is as old as political theater itself. Niccolo Machiavelli, widely considered the “father of modern political science,” summed up such manipulative power-grabbing perfectly back in the 1400s. Though everyone from Winston Churchill to Rahm Emanuel have been improperly credited for the quote, it was Machiavelli who first said, “Never waste the opportunity provided by a good crisis.”
Look up the term Machiavellian in any dictionary. It’s defined as cunning, scheming, and unscrupulous, especially in politics or advancing one’s own career. Synonyms for Machiavellian include devious, crafty, treacherous, two-faced, dishonest, and deceitful. As the great race pimp of our time, you can add Sharptonian to that list of synonyms. Good grief, what a mark to leave on the world.
Anyone who really cares about the Stephon Clark incident for one reason or another already knows the basic details, but if you didn’t give a damn enough to follow it, hey, that’s your every right too. Of course, I’m not saying anyone should be glad that a man is dead, but people die every second of every day, all over the world. Some say we’re on the verge of WWIII, some say we’ll all be under water in 50 years when the polar ice caps melt, and some say nukes will be blowing us all to smithereens long before global warming can do us in anyway. How much emotional energy can any reasonable person be willing to put into the death of one stranger who appeared to have been killed while evading police after allegedly committing a string of vehicle break-ins out in California?
Unfortunately, if you’re prone to being sympathetic to criminals, if you have your own personal ax to grind with the police, or if you don’t know what the hell Syria is, you’re probably an easy mark for Sharpton’s race-baiting in the first place. When the LA Times refers to Clark’s alleged car break-ins as merely “vandalism,” and the New York Times titles its videos How Stephon Clark Was Killed by Police in His Backyard despite the fact that he was on camera hopping a fence after evading the police to get there in the first place, or Rolling Stone calls for Clark to be celebrated as a hero with a statue, you can quite simply see our media is preying on the ignorant and uninformed. Many others who are informed will simply go along with the script out of political expedience, convenience, or a fear of being called a racist—but I won’t be Sharptonian about it. I’ll just be honest.
I know I should follow each and every one of these officer-involved shooting controversies because, as a cop myself, I could very well wind up in the same situation as the ones who shot Stephon Clark—but it’s getting harder to take these contrived backlashes seriously.
I almost just ignored this one altogether because it can very easily be boiled down to this simple message: don’t break into people’s cars and then run from the police or you can reasonably expect something catastrophic to happen to you at some point, whether it is 1, 5, or 10 years from now. Not every officer has 20/20 vision in the dark or nerves of steel when encountering people suspected of crimes. Pro tip: most don’t.
A cell phone can so easily be mistaken for a gun in the darkness, especially when your knowledge, training, and experience tells you that guns are not only routinely carried by people committing felonies, but that they are also quite often stolen out of vehicles during break-ins such as the ones Stephon Clark was suspected of committing the night he was shot. Did the officers make a mistake? Of course they did. There was no gun, after all. Did they “gun down” a black male minding his own business as an act of evil and sheer racism? Quit that shit like cigarettes, CNN! Your secondhand smoke is killing people.
https://youtu.be/eyLxyasztdE
As the media circus set up its tent at the funeral, we saw Clark’s brother, Stevante, acting like a crazed lunatic on stage next to Sharpton—who ironically took a shot at “uppity, bourgeois” people as if he’d been living on the other side of the tracks in Sacramento with Clark’s folks all his life. As I watched, two thoughts came to mind. One, Stevante Clark is most likely suffering from a few mental disorders. Two, maybe he’s just a clown twisting up balloon animals, shooting circus peanuts out of his nose, and stomping around in his red shoes for Ring Master Sharpton. He didn’t even appear legitimately saddened as he smiled and stuck his tongue out. It was truly bizarre—but then I saw the Don Lemon interview.
What came out of Stevante Clark’s mouth on CNN burnt a hole in Don Lemon’s face. It was eye-opening to see this man go in so deep on the media and speak some actual words of truth about their coverage. He might be a basket case but, damn…did he hit the nail on the head when he said this:
“What the media does is they wait until a loved one dies. They find out there’s a tragedy. They swarm that person. They put them in grief. They ruin their lives forever. Their lives are never the same…the way you guys treat us…”
https://youtu.be/8YQV81Pw4UQ
I don’t know the first thing about Stevante Clark and I don’t really care to, but what I do know is that he understands the Machiavellian aspect of what is going on here. The media turned his brother into a ratings cash cow while masquerading to care about the people affected by the death in the same exact way Sharpton and other race pimps have for decades now.
Stevante Clark’s moment of clarity wasn’t enough to get the protesters off the streets or to get people to hold others who commit crimes accountable. It wasn’t enough to keep half-baked “journalists” from taking advantage of other people’s grief or to get anyone to put themselves in the shoes of the officers involved. It wasn’t even enough to make Don Lemon break character for crying out loud. Still, it was a moment to remember the next time blacks and whites, cops and citizens, or liberals and conservatives are pitted against each other in order for Machiavellian sociopaths to make a buck.
